Impact PlasticsGary Cardoza • 877-545-3748

Gary Cardoza, the vice president of sales and marketing for Impact Plastics, said that the company is “a supplier of container lids for the solid waste and recycling industry.” Besides making those dumpster lids, the company also sells parts for dumpsters and roll-off containers.

Prior to working for Impact Plastics, Cardoza worked for 20 years for a company that made lighting products. In the eight years he has been with Impact Plastics, he said he has seen the company grow exponentially.

Founded in 1999, the company currently has 25 employees and a 70,000 sq. ft. facility. All of the company’s products are American-made. “We do a lot with very few people,” he said. The company’s focus is on making high-quality products at a fair price while also incorporating recycled materials and green manufacturing.

Cardoza said that there are some standard sizes for dumpsters in the U.S., generally by region, but even with the standardization, there are probably 100 different sizes of containers. Internationally, he said, the sizes are even more diverse, so there are a lot of potential lid sizes a customer might ask for.

The lids made by Impact Plastics are vacuum-formed, which Cardoza said makes a stronger but more supple product. Not content to make a standard, unchanging product line, the company is constantly talking to customers and designing new products and tweaking old ones to work better.

The product he said was the coolest is the double-impact lid that is specifically designed with thickened areas to “keep it on the container longer.”

“Buying lids is cheap,” Cardoza said, “but replacing them is expensive.” He said that the cost of a lid is actually less than 20 percent of the cost of replacing a lid, not to mention the downtime for maintenance.

He said that the company’s lids last five to seven times longer than similar products, so even though they’re more expensive to purchase, they cost less in the long run.

Lid durability depends on the materials used, the processes employed to make the lids, the blend of plastic, and the engineering and design. Cardoza said that an improperly designed lid will tear when it’s in use. “There’s more science than most people think.”

When it comes to that plastic blend, he said that the company uses some recycled plastic in its blend, but that a lid made from 100 percent recycled material would not be durable enough. Much of the recycled material they use comes from their own customers who are in the waste and recycling industry.

Cardoza said that one of his favorite parts of his job is talking to the customers, from the owners of small hauling companies in small towns to CEOs of major waste hauling companies, about product development. “The job is not boring,” he said.

As much as 95 percent of the innovations in products and design have come from customer input, so it’s extremely important to listen to what the customers have to say. To make sure customers get heard, it’s a company policy that phone calls are not sent to voicemail and people are not put on hold. To make it even easier for customers to communicate with the company on a day-to-day basis and more casual basis, Impact Plastics maintains a very active Facebook page.

Cardoza said that his customers would agree that the company delivers what it promises. “You can’t unshake a hand,” he said, and he is very proud of the company’s integrity as well as the integrity of the products it sells.

However, it’s a challenge to get the company’s message to all the potential customers. “There are thousands of people picking up material,” Cardoza said, and many of those companies would benefit from having lids on containers to keep out water, deter material theft, and keep out contamination.

Cardoza said he expects that over the next 5 to 10 years the company will continue to “go where the market dictates we go,” with new products and innovations. “The world is wide open to us,” he said.